The Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine offered children minimal protection against COVID-19 infection during the omicron surge, far less than it did for older children, New York state public health officials reported Monday.
The Pfizer shots’ effectiveness in preventing coronavirus infection in children age 5 through 11 fell sharply from 68% to just 12% between Dec. 13, 2021, and Jan. 31, 2022, the height of the omicron wave, New York state public health officials reported. They also concluded that protection against severe illness requiring hospitalization was diminished in the younger age group, from 100% to just 48%, based on data from 852,384 newly fully vaccinated children age 12 to 17 and 365,502 children age 5 to 11.
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Older children 12 to 17 saw more modest declines in vaccine efficacy against infection in that time span, from 66% to 51%. They also saw a drop in efficacy against severe illness requiring hospitalization from 85% to 73%.
“It’s disappointing, but not entirely surprising, given this is a vaccine developed in response to an earlier variant,” Eli Rosenberg, deputy director for science at the New York State Department of Health and study lead, told the New York Times. “It looks very distressing to see this rapid decline, but it’s again all against omicron.”
The difference in efficacy between children age 11 and 12 was also striking. By the end of the study period, the vaccine’s effectiveness at preventing infection was 67% in 12-year-olds but just 11% in 11-year-olds. The Californian researchers posited that this difference could be due to the dosage because younger children were given a third of the dose, 10 micrograms, that is given to people 12 and up.
“This is super interesting because it would almost suggest that it’s the dose that makes the difference,” Florian Krammer, an immunologist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, told the New York Times. “The question is how to fix that.”
The findings out of New York run the risk of further alienating parents who are apprehensive about getting their children vaccinated, though that rate of apprehension has fallen since federal regulators gave the authorization to administer shots to 5- to 11-year-olds in early November 2021.
Last month, 33% of parents of children age 5 to 11 said they had gotten their children vaccinated, compared to just 16% last November, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. In those intervening months, the percentage of parents who said they would “wait and see” to get their children vaccinated fell from 32% to 19%, and the rate of parents who said they will “definitely not” vaccinate their children fell 5 points to 24%.
Vaccinating young children against COVID-19 has been fraught with controversy. The majority of the scientific community maintains that children are least susceptible to severe illness due to the virus, which has led many to question whether the vaccine should be required for children at all. Parents are also nervous about injecting their children with a vaccine that was developed in record time to meet a desperate need.
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The Biden administration has been criticized for speeding the approval of shots in children under 5. Pfizer-BioNTech submitted part of its application to the Food and Drug Administration earlier this month to authorize the COVID-19 vaccine for children under 5 without showing completed clinical trial data. The company had initially tested a two-dose regimen in children but announced in December that adding a third dose would be necessary to prompt an immune response.
More recently, the FDA announced it would postpone deliberations on whether to authorize the vaccine for children under 5 after the companies said they wanted to wait until additional clinical trial data on a third dose became available. The delay means that the vaccine will not be available for young children until April at the earliest.
